It’s literally one of the key defining features that separate it from other forms of totalitarianism. That you don’t seem to know this speaks poorly to your understanding of the concept.
It certainly isn’t the only feature and nobody claimed that.
It's one of the multiple still debated feature of fascism. And you said : "They are not fascists [...] Fascism calls for fusion of corporations and state and I haven’t seen that from them."
Both Italian Fascism and National Socialist Germany, the two prima facie examples, exhibited this. Nobody’s debating it except those who want to inappropriately extend the concept to cover other ideologies they don’t like, as a way of associating them with the worst regimes in history for propaganda purposes.
It's not the "calls for fusion of corporations and state" you mentioned above that these people are the most famous for, and what you seem worried about others being associated with; but their ideology and the associated actions. It's no wonder modern forms of a similar ideology draw comparisons to its most famous proponents in recent history.
The association happens by way of that similarity. That's what they're getting called out for.
Opening up a discussion about technical differences in economic policy is completely beside the point, unless you want to distract from the rest of the rotten elephant in the room.
It's not about names, it's about using names as a shorthand for what these people said to motivate and justify their horrific deeds.
They were not the first, or last, but, as you say, among the worst. They serve as an excellent model of what can happen when you put people like that in control of a modern, organized and industrialized state.
And as such, I find it entirely appropriate to invoke their handle as a shorthand for modern ducks quacking a similar tune.
I assume you’re referencing the Holocaust. Unfortunately, genocide and mass killings are not all that uncommon, and there’s been a number of examples coming from wildly different ideologies over the years. (And besides, there’s only one region of the world where civilian mass killings are regularly taking place at the moment, and it’s not the US.)
If you believe historical accounts of the Holodomor, the Soviets perpetuated an even worse genocide. Yet we don’t call the baddies “Stalinists,” because it would be obviously absurd. I’m saying that it’s just as absurd to call them fascists, and the only reason that most people don’t understand this is widespread historical and political illiteracy.
Yes, but this is puts the US in a very different position than Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, which was conducting mass purges of its own citizens, and bringing in citizens of surrounding nations to do the same. The current scale is also much smaller, and the method of murder is more military than industrial.
A closer comparison would be WW1 imperial Germany, allied with the Ottomans, who conducted the Armenian genocide. This fits better in many ways; the WW1 German Empire was also a militaristic, culturally conservative empire that decided to abandon its previous alliances in favor of imperial ambitions. Furthermore, the Armenian genocide was also over control of land, and it was roughly on the same scale.
It’s much more accurate to depict Trump as a Kaiser rather than a Führer, but it loses the emotional resonance. Of course, most people care more about propaganda than understanding reality.
My point is that the term "fascist" here gets used to draw attention to parallels in core ideology, and that this is unsurprising and indeed appropriate.
There will always be differences, and a narrower definition can be useful in a different discussion, but in general, I'd say recognizing the same patterns from the past is the opposite of historical illiteracy and something that we could use more of. Insisting on the finer points _in this context_ comes across as historical pedantry at best, or an inability or unwillingness to recognize the fundamental similarities otherwise.
They just aren’t that similar. One of the reasons that accusations of “fascism” fall flat with so many is that it’s an obvious exaggeration.
It might be pedantry, but in this case it’s appropriate. We’re losing the ability to actually discuss politics above the level of raw tribalism, because every position is always cast as a worst-case extreme. Believe it or not, things could get a lot worse! And they just might!
> things could get a lot worse! And they just might!
Looks like they will. Do you care to bet what sort of party will make them so? You can see them in action across the world and in our past.
> They just aren’t that similar.
That's where we disagree. I say they're similar where it counts the most, at the core. Where did the fascists come from?
There's a combination of xenophobia and populism, this tendency to offer simple solutions to complex problems that tend to involve blaming and getting rid of people that are "different". It usually goes hand in hand with a certain latent or overt brutality, doesn't it, the tendency to not care about the suffering inflicted, about the humanity of others. There's a generous streak of authoritarianism there, wanting to suppress differences, a hostility towards the mechanisms that allow these differences to be expressed and balanced and protected. A disdain for courts that don't rule the right way, for journalists that don't write the right thing, and a soft spot for what we call "alternative facts" these days and for "remigration" - I think the nazis entertained such an idea, too.
I agree that there's an inflationary use of calling out "fascism", but you don't need to look deeply into that Swedish party to see the similarities. From what I read, much more likely than not, somebody like their boss would have been an ardent nazi even before the 1930s, golden party badge and all - and if not, then only because he'd have a competing party for a while.
So yeah, sometimes it's right to call a spade a spade. Another one of the reasons that accusations of “fascism” fall flat is that people just don't want to be associated with _that_, and there are enough differences to talk about to avoid looking in the mirror of the past. You don't need to have arrived at the extremes for people to understand where your heart is, and what is at least the direction you want to go. It's the one that's consistently turned out to be worse.
I just don’t think that pointing to the direction of travel and jumping to the conclusion is politically astute. It’s not an immediate threat and it turns the average person away from political involvement, not towards it.
All the things you pointed out have also been part of other authoritarian movements.
Capital-F Fascism will only come in Western nations after they experience a massive humiliation, not before. This precipitates the broad nationalist anger that’s required. The present course is taking us towards a different kind of totalitarianism, one that doesn’t really have a historical parallel.
Edit: I also think it’s a mistake to equate fascism with some kind of mystical “ultimate evil”. With modern technology, it’s quite possible for us to dream up a future that looks very different than fascism but is somehow even worse. Positioning every political struggle in terms of “fascism” or “anti-fascism” just makes this more likely, because it creates blind spots for new horrors.
Well, I think that pointing to the direction of travel is necessary, because that's where these folks want to go - and if we don't end up there, it's not because they had a change of heart, but because not enough people jumped on their bandwagon.
As I said, I also think that "fascism" is overused as a label, but that it fits in this case and is one of the right labels. Calling the modern revenant by the name of one of its previous forms is not wrong, and should be goddamn possible, at the very least. That was my point. I won't pursue it here anymore, because I agree that it probably does not _work_. It doesn't work because it's wrong, but because it seems like there are simply no words at all that work. This name, that label, new, old, short, long - enough people just don't care, don't see, will not see what they are supporting and voting for. It sucks.
I do agree with you here except on one thing: I don’t think they do want to go towards fascism. The neofeudal “network state” idea that we’re iterating towards is the antithesis of any known state. In abstract it’s another silly ancap experiment that’s bound to fail, but in practice the goal is to splinter any organized resistance to capital into tiny economic zones.
If you want to look at it another way, fascism was domination by national capital using the organs of the state, and it relied on strengthening and centralizing the state. Neofeudalism is domination by transnational capital, with the state reduced to a powerless vestigial remnant.
I think that people do oppose this—see the growing opposition to Flock and data centers, which are small components of the overall picture—but they don’t understand it, and they don’t know what to call it. Personally, I think neofeudalism works well. It even has a Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-feudalism
Edit: I will add nuance here by saying that there is a subset of the right that wants something more akin to an American fascism, mostly a small but vocal group of internet posters, but they are subordinate to both the neofeudalists and the religious nuts and they only get fed scraps from the table. If the AI bubble collapses and drags the economy down with it, the dynamic may flip on its head, depending on how prepared both groups are. Either way, misunderstanding the neofeudalists as fascists allows them to carry out their work in the dark.
It certainly isn’t the only feature and nobody claimed that.